


In which Gil flouts lab safety

by Overlord_Bethany



Series: Poison in Paris [1]
Category: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Genre: Ficlet, Gen, Paris hijinks, Pre-Canon, also some ordinary science, here there be poison
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-24
Updated: 2017-09-24
Packaged: 2019-01-04 17:48:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12173751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Overlord_Bethany/pseuds/Overlord_Bethany
Summary: His lab partner objects.





	In which Gil flouts lab safety

**Author's Note:**

> I have been encouraged to start this teeny little series. And I am weak, so I wrote this instead of doing more reasonable things like yard work or repairing the hole the blackberries bored through the wall of my garage/shop.

Gil blundered into Unstable Chemistry class half asleep, as was his custom. Tarvek glared from his seat at the lab bench. Carousing at all hours again, no doubt. Not everyone had that luxury. Some people had to squeeze a few hours of sleep in between coursework and political machinations, not to mention dealing with the unsightly string of disasters that always seemed to crop up wherever Gil passed by. 

Gil squinted blearily around the classroom, and, finding nearly every other seat occupied, he slumped over and threw his books in a careless heap beside Tarvek’s. 

“There’s a perfectly good seat right behind you,” Tarvek hissed through his teeth. Gil only arched one eyebrow at him. He was right, of course. No one wanted to work with Weismann. No one in the entire school had less of a gift for chemistry, yet here he stayed, ruthlessly soldiering onward, contaminating every sample he touched. Tarvek shot another sidelong glare at Gil. 

Professor Otten liked to start each class with analysis of an unknown. Today, flasks of a clear liquid sat in neat rows on the counters. As soon as Otten signaled for the students to begin, Tarvek slid out of his seat and retrieved one for himself and his sleepy lab partner. 

“I’d almost think you enjoy working with me,” Tarvek said, and Gil shrugged. 

“Of my options, you were the most competent.”

Tarvek wanted that to be a compliment. He scowled. “Am I supposed to be flattered that I meet the minimum standards of the smartest layabout in school?”

“Layabout,” Gil scoffed. He gave the contents of the flask an idle swirl. “I’m an extremely busy person.”

“Busy swilling absinthe and raising havoc!”

“I have nothing to do with the havoc!”

“Sure.” Tarvek rolled his eyes. “It just follows you around like a stray kitten.”

Professor Otten cleared his throat. Tarvek busied himself with setting up a burner and a ring stand. Gil unstoppered the flask and gave its contents a sniff. Then he touched the underside of the stopper to the tip of his tongue. 

“What the hell is the matter with you?!” Tarvek yelped, disrupting their neighbors. 

Ignoring him, Gil wrote in his notes:  _Substance smells/tastes like ~~methn~~  methanol_. 

“THAT’S POISON, YOU IDIOT!”

“Sturmvoraus,” Professor Otten said, turning a stern glare on the both of them, “is there a problem?”

Tarvek squared his shoulders and lifted his chin. “Holzfäller licked the unknown,” he said as flatly as he could manage. 

“Is this true?”

Gil shrugged and slumped back in his seat. He pushed his notes forward, as though his analysis excused poor lab safety. Professor Otten squinted at the page for only a moment before his scowl deepened. Reaching across, he took Tarvek’s notes, and he wrote “+5” in the margin. 

Tarvek stared. “Professor?”

“For not tolerating lax safety standards. You,” he said to Gil, “had best stay after class to help organize the electroplating equipment.”

“I have another class,” Gil objected. 

“Then you’ll have to work quickly.” Professor Otten inclined his head toward the sample in the flask. “Twice today. Lecture begins in fifteen minutes. Your sensory data, such as it is, is not sufficient to identify the unknown.”

Gil’s face twisted in a brief flash of irritation, but he managed not to say that he knew that. Tarvek felt a twinge of pride for his lab partner’s unexpected self control. Otten moved on down the row to scowl at someone else. Gil skipped any pretense of remorse and got right to work, forcing Tarvek to scramble to keep up with him. As much as it vexed him—and it vexed him more than he had words to describe—he had to admit that the two of them worked well together. Within minutes, they had separated the substance into formaldehyde and formic acid. Gil tossed a smug smirk at Tarvek. 

“How do you even know what methyl alcohol tastes like?”

Gil shrugged. 

“You’re an idiot,” Tarvek said. “You’re going to die a messy death brought on by your own belligerent recklessness.” And he would probably have to see it. Tarvek ached inside, and he turned his attention to his own notes. 

“Wouldn’t that make you happy?” Gil sneered at him. 

No, absolutely not. Inwardly, Tarvek recoiled in horror at the idea. And that Gil thought so… Well, Gil hadn’t managed to hurt him so deeply in a long time. “Not if I have to clean up after you!” Tarvek snapped, and he congratulated himself on sounding annoyed rather than anguished. 

“Well, I’ll have to make sure I die far away from you.”

Frustration nudged the fear and the pain aside. “That won’t happen if you insist on tasting things in the lab!”

Gil gave him an unnecessarily thoughtful stare. “Fine,” he said. 

“Fine?” Tarvek repeated, finally arriving at absolutely flummoxed. “That’s it? Just, fine?” He hated how Gil could make him feel this way, and with so little apparent effort. 

Gil shrugged, of all the nerve. Tarvek glared, and Gil dropped his chin into his hands, apparently returning to his earlier drowsing. Tarvek finished writing up his lab report. 

Professor Otten opened the lecture by asking, “What have we learned so far today?” To Tarvek’s surprise, Gil’s hand shot upward. 

“What is wrong with you?” he hissed, and of course Gil ignored him. 

“That friends who dare you to taste methanol cannot be trusted,” Gil said when the professor gestured toward him. Otten made a face of exaggerated suffering. 

“Technically correct. Anyone else?”

“What damn fool gave you methyl alcohol?” Tarvek demanded, leaning close beside Gil, concealing his rage. Gil shrugged again, damn him, and smiled a nostalgic little smile.

“Theopholous DuMedd,” he whispered back. 

“Oh, did he grow up to be an idiot, too?” Or perhaps that had been a murder attempt. DuMedd was the son of a Mongfish, after all. 

“Not too much of one? We were very scientific about it.”

“You’re lucky you’re not very scientifically dead,” Tarvek grumbled. “Or at least scientifically blind.” Did that sound too much like he cared?

Gil smirked at him. Tarvek managed to ignore it for all of four minutes before he could endure Gil’s smugness no longer. 

“What?” he hissed through tightly clenched teeth. 

Gil had arranged all of his pens on top of his books in size order instead of taking notes on the lecture. “You’ve become a bit of a mother hen, haven’t you?” he said, not looking away from his pens. 

Tarvek hid his strangled howl of rage in a coughing fit. There was nothing, absolutely nothing overprotective about his despair of Gil’s cavalier attitude toward ingesting a toxic chemical. “You’re an idiot,” he insisted, a final word on the matter. 

Gil made no effort to defend himself.


End file.
